Visual aids help people understand information. Conveying information to or among groups of people almost necessarily requires creating visual presentations embodying the information. Graphics application programs, such as the Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation application, have helped automate the task of creating such visual presentations. Such graphics application programs allow users to convey information more efficiently and effectively by putting that information in an easily understandable format referred to herein as a graphic.
A graphic is a visual representation, such as a diagram or other drawing, of an idea. A graphic is typically composed of several graphical elements that represent content embodying the idea, such as, for example, a bulleted list. Each graphical element is a part of the displayed graphic. A graphical element can have both textual and graphical characteristics. Whereas graphical characteristics generally refer to pictorial or other visual features of a graphical element, textual characteristics generally refer to the written matter within the graphical element. Depending on the information and the audience, a user of a graphics application program generally determines a specific graphic that will best teach or convey the underlying information. Generally, conventional graphics application programs provide one of two approaches for creating a graphic.
On one hand, some conventional graphics application programs utilize a manual drawing approach in which users have full flexibility in creating and editing the graphic. As such, a user may position and customize the look of the graphical elements in the graphic as he or she sees fit. By providing such “free reigns” on graphic editing, however, this manual approach results in the user having to re-position and re-align those graphical elements in the graphic affected by the customization and/or repositioning of other graphical elements in the graphic. As one may guess, this approach generally requires a great deal of time to manipulate the graphic to render a final product. The user's time is inefficiently spent manipulating the visual aspects of the graphic rather than focusing on the message that is to be portrayed in the graphic. Moreover, this approach requires, at least to some extent, graphical design abilities. Those users that do not have strong design skills are even further limited by the manual approach.
On the other hand, some conventional graphics application programs utilize an automatic thawing approach in which the layout and look for each graphic is automatically defined based on the type of graphic desired by a user and the graphical elements predetermined for the graphic. In this approach, the burden of aligning and positioning graphical elements in the graphic is taken away from the user and placed instead with the application program. However, this approach is problematic in the sense that the user is typically only provided a limited fixed set of graphic definitions to choose from. Additionally, the user is not empowered to customize the graphic based on his or her desires without first abandoning altogether the automatic drawing functionality, thereby defeating the purpose for using this approach in the first place.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.